


Cats and Kings

by athena_crikey



Series: Songbird [7]
Category: Inspector Morse (TV)
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, Gen, Morse is a sourpuss, Parallel to Legal Persons, Post The Dead of Jericho, Supernaturally Attractive, You're a good man Robert Lewis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-27
Updated: 2017-11-27
Packaged: 2019-02-07 09:06:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12837882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/athena_crikey/pseuds/athena_crikey
Summary: Lewis isn’t sure what he’s expecting from the man. Beauty, effervescence, something pure and untouched. What he finds is a morose old bastard with an acerbic wit and the temper of a wounded lion.





	Cats and Kings

Lewis has known of Chief Inspector Morse for a long time – since the sergeant transferred down to Thames Valley from Newcastle, in fact. 

It’s nothing unique; everyone knows about Morse. The station’s resident cynic, alcoholic, and songbird. The first two aren’t unusual in the police – the third is vanishingly rare. The days when songbirds fetched fantastic prices on the open market are gone, but they retain a vestige of high society, a scent of money and class. They feature prominently in expensive magazines, and in Hollywood, and in the media as seen at Monte Carlo and the Riviera and Cannes. 

Not, in other words, in grubby old stations rubbing shoulders with pimps and extortionists and murderers, writing reports in canteens that smell of decades of grease and cigarette smoke, and saluting men who will never in their lifetimes earn as much as they’re worth – _were_ worth. 

Lewis isn’t sure what he’s expecting from the man. Beauty, effervescence, something pure and untouched.

What he finds is a morose old bastard with an acerbic wit and the temper of a wounded lion. Twenty years in the job have obviously taken their toll; his broad shoulders are rounded, and there’s a dark scar above his left eyebrow. But when Lewis meets his eyes – blue, the bright, dazzling blue of a summer’s day – he thinks he sees a hint of what once was there. Of splendor, of grace. Qualities Morse has lost at some point down the years. 

Lewis isn’t surprised when DCI Bell is promoted above Morse; the songbird has no sense of professionalism or tact. He is surprised, though, when Chief Superintendent Strange calls him in after the Anne Staveley case to tell him he’s been assigned as Morse’s sergeant. 

“He’s a good man, is Morse. Bright. Sees things other people don’t, puts together patterns no one else notices. He’s better with puzzles than people, which means he needs a good sergeant to keep things running smoothly.”

“I see, sir.”

“Morse is an unusual officer, Lewis. He’s been used to a fair bit of latitude in his work – frankly, because we couldn’t do without him. But it hasn’t won him any fondness about the station. What he needs is someone who will put up with his guff, but not cross any lines. His bark’s worse than his bite, so don’t mind it. I expect you to have his back – anything you can’t handle, you come straight to me with it.”

“Yes, sir.” Lewis waits a moment and, when nothing further is forthcoming, makes to stand. He’s halfway to the door before Strange speaks, voice low. 

“Oh, and Lewis.” 

Lewis turns back.

“You’re a young man with a bright future down here, so I’ll say this just the once: you make a move I don’t like in regards to Morse’s nature, and I’ll send you a damn sight further north than Newcastle.”

  
***

With the chief super’s threat in mind, Lewis determines to deal with the arson of the Oxford Friendship Centre with kid gloves. At least, until he realises that Morse’s approach is to fire a cannon through the case.

The chief inspector runs roughshod over the head of the society that runs the Centre, alternating between cynicism and real anger, and when he’s done leaves Lewis behind to pick up the pieces and fish out the answers he didn’t care to ask for. Mrs Wainsbury is almost tearful by this point, and Lewis has to do a good deal of comforting to get the rest of her statement out of her. “The chief inspector’s just a bit off-colour at the moment,” he tells her; she sniffles. 

“Very particular he is – everyone says so. _And_ he invites volunteers home, which he’s not supposed to do.”

Lewis, remembering Morse’s abrupt and furious anger at Mrs Wainsbury’s sharing of his secrets, tactfully steers the conversation in a different direction. 

When he’s done with the interview he takes another quick tour of the crime scene, speaks to Forensics, and then heads back to the station. 

He returns to his office, only to discover it’s locked. “Oi,” he calls to Stevens, sitting out in the main office. “My door’s locked.”

“Sorry mate; they’re getting it ready for the next man.”

“Well, where am I supposed to sit?”

Stevens gives him an amused look. “With your new guv’nor, I expect. Just down the hall and around –” 

“Alright, alright, I know where he sits, thanks all the same,” grumbles Lewis.

“You’ll want this,” calls Stevens, holding up a folder. “Your arson case.”

  
***

Morse welcomes Lewis into his office – well, he takes his feet down off the desk at least, although he fails to turn off the radio, playing some classical stuff – and tells him there’s no need to knock at his own door. Lewis finds a desk waiting for him but not much else, the scarred wooden surface empty except for a wire tray and a mug holding a solitary pencil.

He also finds that Morse is unapologetic for his behaviour at the crime scene, his attitude an odd mixture of righteousness and frustration. 

Being in the same room with a songbird is the closest Lewis has ever come to fame and fortune, and as such it’s hard for him to imagine what it’s like being in the constant glass bowl the inspector’s life must resemble. He likes to think he would handle it with better grace, but the fact of the matter is that after imagining living through forty-odd years of people constantly staring and sniggering and gossiping behind his back, he can’t say with much certainty that he would. 

So he accepts Morse’s order to dig up any information on likely perpetrators, and goes out to find himself a telephone.

  
***

Although Lewis does manage to secure a phone for the office, it doesn’t make a difference to the case: that afternoon two officers drinking in a pub overhear two young punks bragging about their torching of the Friendship Centre; after that, all that’s left to do is the official interrogation and the paperwork.

He’s standing in the hallway waiting for the two men to be processed and assigned a room when the chief inspector arrives, fetched by a young PC. 

The man looks as though he’s been working for forty hours straight; his shoulders are sagging, his back bent, his hair raked messily about his head. Once again it’s only his eyes that carry any hint of his nature; when he looks up at Lewis, the younger man feels a shiver run down his spine. There’s a suggestion of beauty there that’s at odds with his appearance, a sense of belonging to another time and place – certainly one far from the gloomy cement hallway of the station – replete with gilt mirrors and black silk and chandeliers. 

Then Lewis blinks, and Morse is staring at the opposite wall, looking like nothing but a tired middle-aged copper about to perform a distasteful task. 

Lewis suddenly wonders about Strange’s motivations in putting them on this case. Whether it was a test for him. Or Morse. Or the pair of them. 

The two suspects are escorted past them and into an empty room. 

“Going to interview them, sir?” asks Lewis. 

Morse takes a deep breath; for a moment, Lewis wonders if he’s going to say no. Refuse to speak to the men who felt fire was a better solution to the question of songbirds than cooperation. 

“I suppose I am,” he says at last, voice low.

“You alright, sir?”

“Tired, Lewis. I’m tired.”

Morse enters the interview room, and Lewis follows. 

“Well, you’re a right pair of pillocks, aren’t you?” says Morse, as he crosses the room to lean against the far wall. The two men look up; they’re young – barely in their twenties – and wearing leather studded jackets and sporting long, lank hair. One has a tattoo on his wrist: thick, black ink in a pattern Lewis can’t quite make out; the other has a scar leading away from his mouth as though someone had tried to widen it with a razor. Billy Keane and James Ridley; according to their files they go by Dozer and Jim. 

“’S that the charge, then?” asks Dozer, in a thick East London accent. 

“The charge is arson,” replies Morse blandly, crossing his arms over his chest. Lewis stands by the door, watching silently. 

They look at each other, grinning inanely. It’s Dozer who answers again: “We didn’t burn nothing down.”

Morse’s eyebrows twitch upwards in subtle incredulousness. “Five witnesses are able to contest that, including two police officers. Next time, don’t confess in a public venue.”

“You got no proof.”

Morse stretches his back, speaking laconically. “A team of officers is pulling apart your homes and workplaces right now – I would be very surprised if they didn’t find something incriminating. Masks, gloves, left over petrol, you know the sort of thing.”

“Petrol is petrol,” breaks in Jim, eyes flashing from Morse to Lewis and back again. “There’s no crime in owning it.”

“And when we find your car, and circulate its picture to everyone who lives on that street to ask if they saw it last night? And when we circulate your descriptions to the people upstairs, and to the volunteers at the Centre?” 

“You got no proof,” repeats Dozer, less certainly this time.

“ _We have your words_ ,” snaps Morse, suddenly, pushing off the wall and striding over to slam his hands down on the table. “Your very own confessions. You broke down the door, you poured the petrol, you lit the match. There was a family living overhead: if they hadn’t gotten out it would be murder. For what, some paltry statement? The inconvenience of having to file insurance claims? Who did you think you would frighten – people who have lived their whole lives being the subject of hatred and bigotry?”

“ _People_ ,” spits Dozer – literally spits, little beads of spittle landing on the black Formica table. “They ain’t people, any more than my bitch is. But we’ve dressed them up like it, let them off their leads, given ‘em jobs an’ property an’ _rights_ they don’t deserve. What are they for? Nothing but being fucked senseless – _that’s_ their job, and they damn well shouldn’t forget it.”

“So you thought you’d remind them,” says Morse, suddenly flat-faced and calm as a breathless sea; a huge expanse of emptiness and crushing weight. 

“I ain’t saying nothing.”

Morse turns away from them, walking straight towards the wall. “Get them out of here, Lewis,” he says, without looking. “We’ll see how a night in the cells treats them.”

When Lewis comes back from seeing the two men locked in holding for the night, he finds Morse has already left.

  
***

“They’ll confess,” says Morse the next morning, after another unproductive round of interrogation and a long interlude for paperwork. “Once the evidence comes in – and it will – they’ll crack. Fools like them would rather have the glory than the chance at an acquittal.”

“Spoke to Mrs Wainsbury,” says Lewis, after a pause. He’d run out to see her at the Society offices early in the morning, feeling that she was owed the news in person after yesterday. “She says they’ve leased a temporary space down the road, until the repairs are finished. They’re open for business.” 

Morse looks at him out of the corner of his eye. “What a relief,” he says, sarcastically. As though he weren’t one of them, as though this whole case had nothing whatsoever to do with him.

As though it hadn’t been his own identity, his own right to life and freedom he had been defending against the two lads in the interrogation room.

“I’m sure it is, sir,” says Lewis, mildly. “People rely on it.”

Morse turns to look at him thoughtfully, the silent weight of his gaze causing Lewis to shift in his seat. 

“Up you get, Lewis,” he says suddenly, rising and pulling on his suit jacket. “Let’s go.”

“Go? Go where?” Lewis looks from his desk to Morse; in the course of one day both have developed a fine layer of papers needing attention.

“The pub, of course. Where else?”

  
***

They end up at the Lamb and Flag – cramped, dark and ancient, like most pubs in the heart of Oxford. Morse sends Lewis to fetch the drinks – a pint of bitter for him, a half-pint for Lewis.

He returns to find the chief inspector established in a corner seat, looking out the window into the street. He puts the drinks down on the table and seats himself; Morse is taking a deep draught before he’s pulled his chair in.

“I thought songbirds didn’t drink. Sir,” he adds, when Morse gives him a look.

“Not out of necessity. I developed a taste for it somewhere along the way: politeness prompted discovery.” 

“Those two punks,” says Lewis, slowly. “They’re so set on hatred and destruction, and they couldn’t even recognize a songbird when he was staring them in the face.”

Morse takes another deep drink, draining half the glass. When he puts it down, he speaks in a cold tone. “Bigotry is rarely born out of personal experience; its flames are much more easily fanned by rumour and falsehood. If you hadn’t been informed – very early on, I expect – by the station grapevine of my nature, would you have known otherwise?”

Lewis thinks back to his first meeting with Morse, in the front hall of the house of his unrequited flame. Of pulling him out of her back window. Of him at crime scenes and in the office and interrogating suspects. None of it let out a glimpse of his nature, of what Lewis knows him to be, entirely through as he aptly put it, ‘the station grapevine.’

Something intangible in his eyes, a sense of otherness, doesn’t hold up in light of all that normalcy. “I suppose not, sir,” he says.

“And yet, you’ve already formed your opinions.”

“Trying not to, sir.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Lewis, of course you have. It takes a minute to form an opinion of someone – but it can take years to undo it.” He rests his hand on the top of his beer glass, and for a moment looks at Lewis. 

Lewis’ breath catches in his throat. What he sees before him isn’t a middle-aged copper who’s gone slightly to seed. He sees elegance and sophistication in Morse’s face, in the suddenly upright line of his spine and his outstretched hand. His eye is drawn to the broadness of Morse’s shoulders, to his moist glimmering lips, to the coy hook of his ankle around the chair leg. The overall effect is of subdued beauty and below it something warmer – a kind of harnessed ardour, a sense of barely restrained sensuality. 

And then he’s looking away, and the moment is gone like a burst soap bubble, like a rainbow unmade by the passing of a cloud over the sun. There’s just a plain man, sitting on an uneven chair in the window of a dusty old pub. 

“Now you know what I am,” says Morse. “What you are is something I’ve yet to learn, but I will in time. If you choose to stay the course.”

Lewis swallows. “If a cat can look at a king, sir, I don’t see why a sergeant from Newcastle can’t be bagman to a songbird,” he says, at last. 

Morse smiles, and while there’s no hint of his former blinding attraction, there’s a softer kindness to it. “Then the job is yours, Lewis.” He drains his drink, and hands the empty glass to the sergeant. “Fetch another, would you?”

END


End file.
